Film doesn't live up to standards of Iranian cinema Screenings of the Cairo International Film Festival s international competition movies kicked off Wednesday with the Iranian film Somewhere Too Far, a substandard melodrama that represents the worst type of story telling from a rather rich, highly respected cinema. The film opens with a close up of a young, naive-looking man called Jamal describing in detail how he murdered a forester for no apparent reason. Flashback a few months earlier, we learn more about Jamal s infatuation with the mute girl Niala, the daughter of a woodcutter's mob boss and the extreme measures he goes through to win her love. The film s first scene misleads the viewers into assuming that they re about to watch a fascinating existential drama in the same vein as Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami s great works. Instead, the film turns out to be a very poor conventional story whose only merits are Nader Masoumi s atmospheric cinematography and the picturesque snowy backdrop. Director Khosro Masoumi seems lost as to what precisely he wants to accomplish. The reason why great Iranian filmmakers such as Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf were able to achieve global recognition is based chiefly on their finesse in creating indigenous Iranian stories that resonate everywhere through the humanistic global themes and ideas they carry. Masoumi s film is too embedded in its local roots for no convincing reason and the little known filmmaker doesn t appear to know how to copy the aforementioned filmmakers techniques in a subtle way. Furthermore, the romance between the two leading characters is never engaging enough to make us sympathize with their forced plight and the dialogue ranges from plain embarrassing to laugh-out-loud bad. In short, this is the first official whiff of the competition.
